1. Technical Field
The subject invention pertains generally to the manner in which transactional documents, such as bills, statements, and the like, are enclosed in envelopes in order to be mailed to recipients via First Class US Mail. More specifically, the subject invention relates to a document size-inclusive window send envelope that appears to present an address through a cutout window that is printed on an inner document, but, in fact, is an internal document information-protected window send envelope that shows an opaque address patch adhered to the inside of the envelope that is specifically matched with the inside document(s).
2. Background Discussion
Transactional documents such as bills, statements, and the like often contain sensitive and timely financial and/or health care information about the recipient that the document's sender is responsible for protecting until it is in the recipient's hands. In recent years federal law has increased the penalties for service providers who fail to adequately protect such information.
This protection responsibility can be legally transferred to the US Postal Service (USPS) if the document is sent via First Class mail in a properly addressed envelope complying with applicable USPS standards. Mail pieces bearing delivery addresses in compliance with this standard enjoy the full protection of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the primary federal law enforcement and security arm of the USPS. Postal Inspectors protect customers and investigate criminals who fraudulently misuse the U.S. Mail to commit crime. Through its security and enforcement functions, the Postal Inspection Service provides assurance to postal customers that their mail will be delivered safely and securely.
The same protections are available from other domestic and international postal authorities, so the term “postal authority” refers to all domestic and international mail delivery services that provide a level of security substantially the same as that of the United States Postal Service.
To help ensure that documents are properly addressed, senders of First Class mail, long ago, mostly abandoned the idea of printing a recipient's mailing address on the outside of the envelope, opting instead to cut a hole or “window” through the envelope so that the address printed on the document inside showed through. This eliminates the risk of the address on the outside not matching the address on the document inside the envelope.
At the same time, senders of less-sensitive and less-timely information such as advertisements have mostly opted to send documents via Standard Class mail using envelopes that do have the recipient's address printed on the outside. In many cases the contents are the same for each recipient. The outside-printed address is an advantage for such mailers because it eliminates the need to mechanically align a send address printed on the document inside with the mailing envelope window.
There are various consequences of the current practices. Over time, mail recipients have become accustomed to, at a glance, considering the windowed envelope as an indicator of how important a particular mail piece is and whether it is personalized for the recipient or just a generic advertisement that can be discarded without being opened. Thus, the mere presence or absence of a send envelope window can play a valuable role in determining the degree of attention paid to the mail piece by the recipient and whether it will be opened, regardless of the envelope's actual contents. This makes First Class mailers extremely reluctant to abandon the use of windowed envelopes for fear the envelope will be discarded unopened.
At the same time, mergers and acquisitions in the financial, health care, and telecommunications industries and the consequent drive to reduce costs through consolidation has led to the need to make large numbers of document types with many different address locations and fold specifications share the same windowed envelope design so they can be processed in the same production run and mailed more efficiently.
However, these efforts have been stymied by several critical, competing factors. For example, the different locations of send addresses printed on the different types of documents pushes mailers to enlarge the envelope window so the same envelope can accommodate different send address locations, but the need to protect Personally Identifiable Information (PII) printed near the send address location from being viewed through the envelope window pushes mailers to shrink the envelope window to keep the PII data secure.
Further, mailers have an incentive to keep the envelope's size large so that high speed inserting equipment can run more efficiently, but this gives the document inside more room to move around, requiring the mailer again to increase the size of the window to accommodate the moving address, but once again only at the risk of exposing more PII data.
Mailers often address the above problems by adding an additional sheet to the document, a cover page whose purpose is solely to present the mailing address in a manner that is mechanically aligned with the envelope's window, which effectively protects all PII on the pages behind, sometimes called an Address Vehicle Page (AVP) (see FIG. 1—PRIOR ART).
One of the problems associated with this AVP method is the additional production cost of the extra sheet, which must be produced in line with the other sheets in the document, often during peak demand periods, plus the additional postage cost of the extra weight. In the case of international mailings, part of the postage cost is directly related to total package weight. With mailings typically numbering in the millions of mail pieces for a large scale mailing facility, every gram/ounce counts and these costs can create a substantial barrier to the method's use, often substantial enough to negate its utility. In addition, environmentally conscious recipients often complain to the sender that the AVP is a waste of paper and environmentally unsound.
Yet further, mailers have an incentive to use the same envelope for documents that consist of a small number of sheets, as those that have a large number of sheets, because they can be processed in the same production run and placed into the same mailing tray, substantially reducing postage costs. However, the large variance in the number of sheets from one document to the next impacts the alignment of the send address within the envelope window (see FIG. 2—PRIOR ART), which pushes the mailer to increase the size of the window, only to once again increase the risk of exposing more PII data.
Yet additionally, mailers have an incentive to use the same equipment and processes to insert the widest possible array of document types efficiently, but still end up with each document's send address properly aligned with the send envelope window. As seen in FIG. 3—PRIOR ART, this presents a complex variety of permutations, considering just the most common combinations of document folding habits, and send address locations (i.e. either at the top of the page or at the bottom of the page, whether the documents are presented to the inserting machine face up or face down, and whether the documents are fed into the equipment either head first or foot first).